The Blog I'm Not Writing

… At least not seriously.

 

 

Surprise (well, not really)!  Turns out, content/trigger warnings are, themselves, triggering.

Just a wee sample of what be going down re this subject:

What if Trigger Warnings Don’t Work?
New psychological research suggests that trigger warnings do not reduce negative reactions to disturbing material,
and may even increase them.
( The New Yorker   )

 

 

I’d been wondering about that – as in, wondering when someone would get around to studying the downsides of that which is often prefaced (or later appended) with They meant well, and  It was done with good intentions.

“…the value of trigger warnings has been hotly debated. Proponents argue that they serve to inform and educate consumers of the content they are about to consume. They argue that people, particularly those who have suffered a traumatic experience in their past, will be better able to handle difficult content if they are prepared in advance and are given the choice to engage or not.

Opponents argue that trigger warnings coddle and infantilize adults, and that they facilitate avoidance and/or inflate morbid and prurient curiosities, thus increasing rather than decreasing emotional turmoil and anxiety. In promoting avoidance of challenging material, opponents argue, trigger warnings also run counter to the clinical literature, which shows that trauma is best overcome through exposure rather than avoidance…..

… a meta-analysis of the literature on trigger warnings…indicated that warnings were ineffective at their proposed goals….  The results show, in effect, that…. Trigger warnings are neither necessary nor devastating for those who receive them. ‘Existing research on content warnings, content notes, and trigger warnings…suggests that they are fruitless, although they do reliably induce a period of uncomfortable anticipation.’ ”

(excerpts, my emphases, “Trigger Warnings Can Be Triggering:
Recent research questions the utility of trigger warnings.
Trauma: Psychology Today, 4-1-24 )

 

 

Let’s say you are a

* writer; college professor; a stand-up comic; journalist

And you are

* writing an article/giving a lecture on/composing a skit

which mentions assault, and you voluntarily (or are forced to, by an editor; nightclub manager; faculty dean, or some other gatekeeper) post a content warning, ala

( The following article/lecture/performance subject matter
deals with assault, or whatever the ostensible trigger).

What you have done is to guarantee that the intended audience for that content warning – someone who has been assaulted – is now thinking about the fact that they were assaulted, without having the benefit of reading or hearing your material.  Indeed, there may be benefits to them reading or hearing your material, but they’ll never know, because they’ve been warned away from it, AND, because of that warning, they are now thinking about their assault – they’ve been “triggered” – without obtaining different perspective or knowledge about or possible relief from their experience.

Dateline: too many decades ago. I read a book about Saturday Night Live…

 

 

…the long running, live sketch comedy-variety show which was then in its infancy.  The book included a couple of scripts for SNL skits that never made it on the air, usually (not always)  [1],  because the director and/or the network censor thought the skit’s humor went “too far.” One memorable ( to moiself ) censored skit was about family and friends in a hospital room, visiting a girl who had been in a coma for some time.  A couple of the visitors brought bouquets of flowers; one visitor, not quite sure what to do, announced to the girl’s parents that he had brought “some moss for her north side.”

I later read a review of that book, which featured an interview with a woman whose daughter was hospitalized in a PVS (persistent vegetative state).  This woman had also read the SNL book, and when she read the script of that girl-in-a-coma skit, she said that she laughed “…for the first time in months.”  Reading about that canceled skit-that-went-too-far/included-jokes-of-questionable-taste was helpful to her, providing some well-needed levity in a life that had turned bleak.  If that book had had a trigger alert, she might have been steered away (“Oops, I better not read this – it might upset me”) from what turned out to be a totally unexpected yet therapeutic form of relief for her.

Arguably some of the more problematic places for content warnings are schools – particularly in university classrooms, where many professors have voiced their own content warnings about what they have become “allowed” to say and teach.

“….The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has also tackled the issue, and it has come down squarely against TW (trigger warnings).

Here are some of the most salient points of the AAUP report:

* The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.

* [TW] single out politically controversial topics like sex, race, class, capitalism, and colonialism for attention. … If such topics are associated with triggers, correctly or not, they are likely to be marginalized if not avoided altogether….

* Trigger warnings conflate exceptional individual experience of trauma with the anticipation of trauma for an entire group.

* A trigger warning might lead a student to simply not read an assignment or it might elicit a response from students they otherwise would not have had.

* Some discomfort is inevitable in classrooms if the goal is to expose students to new ideas, have them question beliefs they have taken for granted, grapple with ethical problems they have never considered.

* Trigger warnings reduce students to vulnerable victims rather than full participants in the intellectual process of education.

* The classroom is not the appropriate venue to treat PTSD, which is a medical condition that requires serious medical treatment….”

( Excerpts, “The False Dichotomy of Trigger Warnings”
by Massimo Pigliucci, ITAL The Philosophers’ Magazine  )

 

 

“In 2019, the (Tate) museum warned patrons of the ‘violent’ and ‘challenging’ images at the entrance to an exhibition of 200-year-old works by painter William Blake, known for his then-radical approach to exploring struggles throughout 18th Century England.

In 2020, Tate slapped a ‘sexually explicit content’ warning on an exhibition of illustrations by Victorian-era artist Aubrey Beardsley, best known for his… well, sexually explicit content. It’s the trigger warning equivalent of a ‘contains cream’ label on a gallon of ice cream…..

It is very possible that these attempts to place buffers around art, education and even children’s entertainment are not only useless but counterproductive. A 2020 study published in the journal ITAL Clinical Psychological Science found that trigger warnings offer little to no help in avoiding painful memories and, on the contrary, may actually be harmful for those with associated emotional trauma.

‘Specifically, we found that trigger warnings did not help trauma survivors brace themselves to face potentially upsetting content,’ said Payton Jones, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Harvard. ‘In some cases, they made things worse.’

Trigger warnings also perpetuate a culture of victimhood. Researchers discovered that they seem to increase the extent to which people see trauma as central to their identity – which, in addition to making them insufferable in general, can also worsen the impact of their PTSD.

‘I was surprised that something so small – a few trigger warnings in a short experiment –could influence the way someone views their trauma,’ continued Jones. ‘In our culture, I think we overemphasize how important trauma should be in a person’s life. Trigger warnings are one example of this.’

( excerpts, my emphases, “Top 10 Signs Trigger Warnings Have Gone Too Far”
by Christopher Dale, Listverse; Politics | March 4, 2021 )

 

 

*   *   *

*   *   *

Department Of Why I Like Walking Just Before Sunrise

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of My, That’s A Big One

Dateline: Saturday.  MH and moiself  made a trip up to Winlock, WA to see the  World’s Largest Egg ®. Actually, the trip was to see daughter Belle, who hadn’t been able to get time off from work to spend Christmas with us.  Doing the Google maps thing, MH determined that the lil town o’ Winlock was at a halfway point between where Belle lives in Washington, and when MH discovered that Winlock was also home to a notable Roadside Attraction ® – the  WLE –   that was all the inspiration we needed.  We met Belle In Winlock for lunch, exchanged belated Christmas gifts and had fun playing the new party game she gave us (“Priorities”) while eating some of the worst pizza/pasta ever,  [2]  then checked out the  WLE before bidding our daughter a fond à plus tard and heading back to our respective domiciles.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of A Blast From The Past

New Year; new project: taking an excerpt from a past blog, from the same time frame (the second Friday of whatever month).  Perhaps moiself  will like this enough that it will turn out to be a regular blog feature for 2025?  Time, and my capacity for reruns, will tell.

This journey down memory lane is related to the most convincing reason a  YOU-of-all-people-should-write-a-blog-why-aren’t-you-writing-a-blog?!?!?!   [3]   friend gave me, all those years ago,   [4]   as to why I should be writing a blog: a blog would serve as a journal of sorts for my life.  Journal/diary-resistant moiself  would have some sort of a record, or at least a random sampling, of what was on my mind – and possibly what was on the nation’s mind – during a certain period of time.

Now I can, for example, look back to the second Friday of a years-ago January to see what I was thinking. (or as MH putc it, WHAT was I thinking!?!? )

 

 

Here is an excerpt from my blog of 1-12-18 ( The Bullet List I’m Not Embracing ).

 

 

We’ve discovered that opportunities for the gathering of anesthesia-induced babbling memories do not fade with age,    [5]   and are perhaps even more enjoyable when your children are young adults. Last Friday afternoon, Belle underwent a procedure which required general anesthesia. After MH and I were allowed to see her in the post-op recovery room, I did not record her ramblings (Belle was with it enough to object to that), but did manage to take a few notes. There are some gems I know I missed, mostly because I just wanted to be present to enjoy the stream of conscious moments caused by her brain only partially connecting with her mouth:

*   “Is there boob PT?
(After MH and I told Belle that the upper floors of the building she was in were dominated by Orthopedic surgeons and PTs -Psychical Therapists.)

*   “It stays on for THREE DAYS.“
Belle pointed to the anti-nausea patch the anesthesiologist had placed on the side of her neck, then lowered her voice to a solemn whisper.  “That’s a lotta days!”

* Belle said the nurses told her she was talking about bear heads (   “Let me tell you about the grizzly bear head…” ), and that they don’t get many people who talk about bear heads.    [6] 

*  “Do you remember when people were, like, in the future, everything will be chrome?  It didn’t happen.  I think they meant stainless steel.”

* Belle: “I’d like to be Spider-Man.”

Moiself: “But you don’t like spiders.”

Belle: “No sir, I do not. But, I appreciate spiders.”

* “Seth Meyers is like a marshmallow, with good hair.”   [7] 

While waiting for the nurse to remove her IV, Belle began to describe to MH and I, with great seriousness, how the cycle of banana mitosis and meiosis indicates that bananas can tell time. The morning after her surgery, I asked Belle if she remembered doing that. She said she didn’t, but that it’s no surprise because,  “Actually, I talk about that a lot.”   [8]

 

 

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [9]

“Humanism affirms that people can solve their problems without imagining
supernatural beings; the arts and sciences flourish when ignorance and superstition
are thus overthrown.”

( Joe Nickell, American author, editor, investigator of “paranormal” phenomena,
senior research fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry )

\

*   *   *

May you not be triggered by trigger warnings;
May you enjoy a trip to see a notable roadside attraction;
May you one day be able to tell the time by
consulting the banana on your head;

…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

[1] Sometimes it was just a matter of time – the show ran long in rehearsal and something had to be cut.

[2] Which shall not be mentioned here

[3] I was adamant about not writing a blog…thus, the title of the blog I eventually decided to write.

[4] Was it really over twelve years ago?

[5] This is contingent upon having surgery for something relatively minor, ala wisdom teeth removal.

[6] This one makes sense to me, and probably was not the non sequitur the nurses thought it to be: Belle has prepped stuffed and mounted a grizzly bear head in her work as a docent for her college’s natural history museum.

[7] I likely sparked that comment by mentioning that Seth Meyers was hosting the Golden Globe Awards show.

[8] She’s a Biology major.

[9] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org